a day Came Looking for the Man Who Never Stopped Collecting — a day คุยกับพี่ต๋อง ผู้ชายที่หยุดสะสมไม่ได้

นิตยสาร a day เดินหลงอยู่ในโกดังกว่า 4,000 ตารางเมตรของเรา แล้วนั่งคุยกับพี่ต๋อง ผู้ก่อตั้ง PAPAYA ถึงจุดเริ่มต้นของของสะสมนับแสนชิ้น — บทสัมภาษณ์ที่อธิบายตัวตนของร้านนี้ได้ดีที่สุดชิ้นหนึ่ง

Thailand’s defining pop-culture magazine came to ask a simple question: how does one man end up with a hundred thousand objects?

Not a business plan — a life that got out of hand

a day’s writers walked more than 4,000 square metres of corridors and hidden rooms and met the founder, Khun Tong, who started collecting as an architecture student and simply never learned how to stop. The answer he gave them was disarming: there was never a master plan. When you love something, you buy it. Do that for four decades and you get PAPAYA.

The magazine also met the quieter half of the operation — his wife, who personally arranges every display in the building. If a corner of PAPAYA has ever made you stop and stare, that was her.

From tin toys to 19th-century armchairs

a day catalogued the range better than we ever have: tin kitchenware, Chinese porcelain, antique typewriters, surgical lamps, armchairs older than the country’s railways — from 30-baht trinkets to museum-grade pieces. By the time they visited, up to 200 people were walking the floors every day, most of them from overseas.

Come see what they saw — our visiting guide has everything you need, and the full PAPAYA story picks up where the interview left off.

Read the original feature at a day magazine (in Thai).